Containment

This article intervenes in the newly resurgent nuclear debate, particularly in relation to carbon neutral energy production. Combining the critical study of nuclear energy to science fiction narratives and documentary film, I argue that Michael Madsen’s film Into Eternity (2010) reframes debates about our energy commitments: what does it mean to rely on a single source for most of our energy needs? Others have treated Madsen’s film as an interrogation of the logic of containment and the tenuous character of the warning signs for waste storage. I engage these aspects of the film not as strictly limited to issues of nuclear waste, but also as symptoms of the vast energy impasse between the demand for the dense energy of fossil fuels and the disastrous ecological consequences of their continued use. The film addresses a contemporary audience as much as it addresses countless unknowable, and possibly alien, others; thus, by bringing this science fictional address to documentary, Into Eternity works through the deep impact of high energy use in late capital.

How are unemployment and violence linked? Ideas about this link are driven by an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) literature on crime, gangs and unemployment and by recent economic models of developing country 'civil wars'. These ideas are commonly linked with an increasing interest in the age-structure of demography in developing countries, in particular the observation of a common 'youth bulge'. There is a very widespread view that youth unemployment is a key cause of insurgency or civil war. The paper then shows that there are other analytical approaches to studying labor market participation and its links to violent behavior, in wars and in other forms of violence, including domestic violence. Indeed, there is an analytical bridge between the Beckeresque and these other approaches, constructed out of the arguments of many economists who remain within the mainstream of economic orthodoxy but whose own economic approach has dealt with &#...

In the studies of international relations containment and
engagement are often understood as strategies of foreign policy. This
article seeks to explore containment and engagement through less
frequent theoretical perspective: to find out what features of containment
and engagement allow calling them middle-range theories.
The article presents main features of meta and middle-range
theories, draws attention to realism as meta-theory and then distinguishes
the most characteristic features of containment and engagement in order
to find their matches in the attributes of middle-range theories.
The article concludes that containment and engagement can be
called middle-range theories, since they are power balancing theories
analyzing this phenomenon in a specific point of view (individual
approaches to the instruments, regions, targets), they are comprehensive
and stay within the field of power balancing analysis.

Over the past decade and a half, psychedelic drug-induced experiences have been returning to psychiatry as promising new healing modalities. The case of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy can inform how we think about the context of drug use because psychedelics are commonly considered to be sensitive to the ‘[mind] set and setting’ of their use. As such, epistemic and therapeutic concerns among psychedelic researchers and therapists over the importance of set and setting are interwoven. My ethnography of psychedelic therapeutics both inside and outside of the clinical trials on the east coast of the United States from 2015 to 2019 suggests that there are added political and economic imperatives to contain psychedelic use. Working with this insight, I suggest psychedelic researchers and therapists are producing immense experiences that tend to overflow the attempts at their containment. I also identify two qualities central to the set and setting of the emerging modality of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. The first is a labor of protecting spaces which reveals an attentiveness to disconnection that can be read as in tension with the more commonly evoked emphasis on connection found within psychedelic discourses. The second is how psychedelic experiences (as ‘mind-manifesting’) are understood to reflect the self, and in so doing re-present epistemic disagreements about the nature of the self thus reflected. Taken together, I propose that these two qualities of psychedelic containment offer an analytics for reading the contemporary cultural politics of psychedelic use.

Ο κατευνασμός αποτελεί μια απάντηση σε ένα στρατηγικό πρόβλημα. Ένα κράτος αποφασίζει να κάνει παραχωρήσεις προς ένα άλλο με σκοπό να
αντιμετωπίσει τη στρατηγική κατάσταση που έχει διαμορφωθεί. Διαχρονικά ο κατευνασμός έχει επικριθεί ως μια αποτυχημένη στρατηγική που οδηγεί νομοτελειακά στη σύγκρουση. Ωστόσο, τις τελευταίες δεκαετίες πολλοί μελετητές των διεθνών σχέσεων υποστηρίζουν ότι υπό συγκεκριμένες προϋποθέσεις η συγκεκριμένη στρατηγική δύναται να είναι αποτελεσματική. Το βασικό συμπέρασμα της παρούσας διατριβής είναι ότι για να είναι η στρατηγική κατευνασμού επιτυχημένη, δηλαδή να μην εκλειφθεί από το κατευναζόμενο κράτος ως ένδειξη αδυναμίας, πρέπει να συνδυάζεται με μια αξιόπιστη και αποφασιστική αποτρεπτική στάση η οποία θα πλαισιώνεται από κατάλληλες στρατηγικές επιλογές όπως η εξισορρόπηση και η ανάσχεση. Επιπλέον, και με δεδομένο ότι η Ελλάδα δεν έχει ακόμα διαμορφώσει θεσμικά την εθνική της στρατηγική, βασική διαπίστωση της διατριβής είναι ότι η στρατηγική της Ελλάδας έναντι της Τουρκίας, για το χρονικό διάστημα από το 1996 (κρίση των Ιμίων) έως και σήμερα, είναι μια στρατηγική κατευνασμού που δεν έχει αποδώσει, μιας και οι αναθεωρητικές διεκδικήσεις, σε συνδυασμό με την επιθετική παραβατικότητά της, εντείνονται με το πέρασμα του χρόνου.

"The Containment of Russia: geopolitics, statecide and astropolitics"

Abstract:

The central idea of this thesis is to discuss the phenomenon of Russian containment from three-dimensional fronts: the territorial expansion of NATO, the statecide of Russian allies and Astropolitics, as well as the relevance or not of the theory of Neo-Eurasianism in this process. The theoretical approach revolved around the theories and concepts of classical geopolitics as well as realistic approaches to international relations, in order to highlight the relevance of the geographical factor in the phenomenon in question. The cartographic representation, especially in its thematic aspect, was present through a series of maps, most of them made by the author. Regarding the conceptual range, the concepts of checkerboard and shatterbelt, by Phil Kelly, as well as the Robert Jervis model were used. In the same way, the notion of balance of power guided the entire search for this study. In addition, the critiques of important academic realists (Henry Kissinger, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt) were emphasized and the primacy of geographic space in determining the phenomena studied was highlighted. A new concept emerged from this analysis, the Statecide, a direct product of the relationship between Russian containment and the formation of geopolitical checkerboars, as well as the establishment of shatterbelt. The structure of this thesis is divided into six chapters, namely: Methodological Introduction, 1) Geopolitics as a science, 2) Russia's territorial problems, 3) NATO's expansion towards the Russian border, 4) Statecide, intervention and world disorder, 5) Astropolitics and 6) Neo-Eurasianism as a Russian idea. The intellectual effort of this study sought to highlight the importance of the phenomenon of Russian containment as well as the urgency of resuming the idea of balance of power as moderator of the geopolitical escalation of the historical moment in which international politics finds itself, always emphasizing the importance of Geography and Geopolitics in understanding this issue.

The doctrine of containment would have a lasting impact on the conduct of United States (US) foreign policy during the Cold War. It involved a series of attempts to deal with the idea of preventing the Soviet Union from using the power and position it won as a result of that WWII to reshape the international order, a prospect that seemed, in the West, no less dangerous than what Germany or Japan might have done had they had the chance.

This paper will argue that containment was the default foreign policy strategy of the US during the Cold War (1945-1989) as it became the reinforced and “naturalized grand strategy”, marginalizing alternative accounts of US imperialist ambitions, but which evolved from being an openly confrontational ideological containment policy of the early Cold War years to an increasingly more militarized covert counterinsurgency containment. Firstly, this paper will elaborate on the concept of containment and its origin. It will then show that containment was the default foreign policy by demonstrating how each president in the Cold War era used containment – although in varying forms and degrees – as an instrument of foreign policy in dealing with the Soviet Union.

COURSE: 3007GIR American Foreign Policy. 09.10.13

This thesis throws light on an oft-overlooked element of the containment policy of the United States under President Harry S. Truman (1945 – 1953): its theoretical geopolitical foundations. It contends that during this period, that of the early Cold War, American foreign policy was to an important degree informed, and therefore shaped, by geopolitical concerns and arguments. This was the case to such an extent that it is possible to speak of an internal geopolitical mode of thinking possessed by the administration, the geopolitics of containment, which existed alongside more traditional concerns of simple power politics and ideology. Based on a review of the existing literature on both the field of geopolitics as well as the early Cold War, the thesis comes to the conclusion that this geopolitical element of containment has been touched upon only briefly by previous studies. This leads to the research question at the basis of the thesis: was American foreign policy influenced by geopolitics in the early Cold War (1945 – 1953), and if so, how? The thesis argues that the answer to the first question is affirmative, by examining American policy documents of the period on the presence of geopolitical terminology. It then continues by analyzing the geopolitical elements in the rhetoric and argumentation of these same documents. The conclusion is reached that the geopolitics of containment developed alongside the wider policy of containment, coming into existence in 1946 and becoming increasingly prevalent as the years went on. In addition, the thesis argues that this process was linked to the increasing hostility toward the Soviet Union toward the end of the Truman administration. This is also tied to the fact that the geopolitics of containment was a type of analysis overwhelmingly preoccupied with policy toward the Soviet Union. The final conclusion is that geopolitical analyses were general in nature, and appeared less in policy discussions of a more technical nature. The thesis concludes that the geopolitical perspective on containment policy was an integral part of the increasingly narrow world view of the American government, and posits that studying it further may provide new outlooks on the role of the United States in the origins of the Cold War.

In the post-Tiananmen and post-Cold War era, China has not only lost its strategic alliance with the US against the Soviet Union, but has stepped in to be seen as the US’s imagined enemy. The New York Times’s discourse about China policy from 1990 to 2000 consisted of three “ideological packages”: containment, engagement, and globalization, which represented different strategic variations on the same ideological theme of peaceful evolution. The elite media discourse is characterized as “established
pluralism”. First, it represents a plurality of viewpoints within the established policy contour and the ofŽ official circle. Second, it tends to domesticate foreign realities in the course of constructing Orientalist discourses. Third, this diversity-within-unity is routinized in the institutionalized structure and practice of the elite press.

Introduction:

Etched into the self-understanding of most liberals, especially political liberals, is value placed in toleration and political neutrality. We can agree to disagree—if no unnecessary harm comes to others because of views held and professed. This paper examines the ways illiberal and/or unreasonable views can be contained legitimately in a political liberal society, and some of the pressing reasons to undertake, or abstain from, such measures.

Theoretical background for the discussion is provided by Rawlsian political liberalism which still serves as an benchmark regarding the topic even if Rawls does not say much about what might be involved in the issue (§1). Jonathan Quong, however, has presented a justification for the preventive containment of unreasonable views that is heavily influenced by Rawlsian political liberalism (§2). I intend to show that there are some quite significant worries concerning Quong’s particular justification (§3). In the end, the paper puts forward a tentative suggestion that, in order to rise to the challenges presented, political liberals would do well to pay more attention to personal respect and relations of recognition (§4).

No definitive solution to the problem of containment in political liberalism is provided here. Furthermore, the content of reasonableness is not examined, neither are more inclusive accounts of containment. The main purpose is to offer insight into the particular problems political liberals face when arguing for the preventive (and exclusive) containment of views.

Is the Recovery Fund really the new Marshall Plan, as we hear more and more often in many places and contexts? With the aim of critically verifying this leitmotif, the essay first traces back the nature, the structure and the conditionalities of the Marshall Plan, also highlighting its less known and declared aspects, also in terms of geopolitical strategies. It then analyses the current Recovery Fund and its functioning, which unequivocally shows the return of the “vincolo esterno” as an instrument of internal policy and, revitalizing at least apparently the European Union, is part of a wider dialectic between Neo-Atlanticism, Build Back Better World (B3W) and Belt & Road Initiative (BRI). In this context, the Recovery Fund, with similarities but also substantial differences with the Marshall Plan, far from constituting a truly historic 'moment', rather seems to be a missed opportunity on the road to European construction.

This report presents evidence on the progress made by national authorities and other agents over the past six months. Globally in the animal health sector, there have been some significant enhancements in avian influenza detection capacity, surveillance and reporting systems, trans-boundary disease controls, poultry vaccination policies, and poultry compensation arrangements. In the human health sector, there is evidence for global enhancements in surveillance and reporting systems; and the information obtained is consistent with increased numbers of health care workers trained in highly pathogenic avian influenza, with rising availability of personal protective equipment, and with growth in planned population coverage by anti-viral stockpiles. This report identifies as priorities for international action in 2007: firstly to sustain the political commitment for national and international action: the risk of complacency cannot be taken. Secondly, capability for rapid reporting and re...

In the recent years Romani migrations from former communist countries to the “West” were and still are represented as a threat in public and media discourse. Migrating Romani men and women caused many reactions on diverse levels. In these discussions the focus is put in particular on their supposed identities as members of Romani communities and along with these go “traditional” stereotypes, which are ascribed to Romani men and women. When analysing these perceptions it stands out that Romani identities are perceived as homogenous and stable in migration discourses. In our contribution we are analysing these ethnic ascriptions by applying trans-disciplinary concepts stemming from Postcolonial Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies and Transnational Studies. As these theories and approaches have recently been applied in diverse studies on ethnicity, making use of them with regard to Romipen seems to be promising and might lead to new outcomes.

This paper summarizes medieval definitions and divisions of consequences and explains the import of the medieval development of the theory of consequence for logic today. It then introduces the various contributions to this special issue of Vivarium on consequences in medieval logic.

The design of a nuclear reactor containment building is of key importance in order to enhance the safety of a nuclear power plant. Owing to nuclear accidents such as TMI, Chernobyl and Fukushima, more and more attention is paid to the passive concept in nuclear power development. In order to improve the safety of new generation nuclear power plant, passive systems are widely used, passive containment cooling system in AP1000 is one of the typical example of such kinds of systems. It's function is to transfer the heat produced in the containment to the atmosphere and keep the pressure in the vessel below the threshold under such accidents as Loss of coolant (LOCA), main steam line break (MSLB), etc. The system operates based on natural circulations inside the steel vessel and in the air baffle outside the containment, and the cooling water is sprayed to the steel surface to enhance the heat transfer process. A proper model simulating the system behavior is needed for system design and safety analysis, and a multivolume lumped parameter approach is employed in order to analyze the containment integrity and to study the long term response of postulated Loss of coolant (LOCA) accidents and Main steam line break (MSLB) accidents. However, the temperature and pressure distributions cannot be described detailed by such model, which is important to study the T-H characteristics in the containment. In this paper LOCA has been simulated on MATLAB using a given pipe break size and the response of containment is analyzed. Furthermore, the results are compared with the results in the Westinghouse Design Control Document 2002. Then the thermal hydraulic performance is studied, the factors such as the air temperature, containment pressure and mass flow rate of the coolant and their effects on the containment are analyzed. This research is done to get further insight on the safety analysis of reactor containment regarding maximum temperature and stress calculation inside the containment.

There is a cross-linguistic continuum, or implicational scale, of languages' terms covering the spatial relations from containment (IN) to support (ON), discovered by Bowerman and Pederson (1992, ms; see also Bowerman 1996, Bowerman and Choi 2001, Feist 2000, Feist and Genter 1998, 2001, 2003, Levinson and Meira 2003). The results of their research, covering more than forty languages from twenty-five different language families, show that it is possible to rank pictured situations defining spatial relations between two stationary objects on a continuum. Where each language in their research divided IN and ON varied, with some languages, such as Dutch, making more than two distinctions (with op, aan, and in), and others, such as Spanish, having a single term (en) that covered the entire continuum. Still other patterns were seen in as well, with Berber having two terms (di and x) that overlap, rather than having a clean boundary between them. However, significantly, no language in their research defied the continuum by grouping discontinuous situations.

However, in some languages, including Japanese, the IN/ON continuum appears not to be very relevant, based on their research, and the question of if (or to what extent) it is universal arises. In this paper, I ask whether the IN/ON continuum is truly germane in Japanese, a language for which it seems somewhat tangential based on analysis of postpositions and relator nouns. The results show that the continuum is relevant elsewhere in Japanese, supporting the idea that the IN/ON continuum may potentially be relevant in all languages, as long as one knows where to look.

References

Bowerman, M. 1996. The Origins of Children’s Spatial Semantic Categories: Cognitive Versus Linguistic Determinants. In J. Gumperz. and S. Levinson, eds., Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, 145-76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bowerman, M., and S. Choi. 2001. Shaping Meanings for Language: Universal and Language-Specific in the Acquisition of Spatial Semantic Categories. In M. Bowerman and S. Levinson, eds., Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development, 475-511. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bowerman, M. and E. Pederson. 1992. Crosslinguistic perspectives on topological spatial relations.  Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, December.

Bowerman, M. and E. Pederson. ms. INwards from ON and ONwards from IN: The crosslinguistic categorization of topological spatial relationships. 

Feist, M. I. 2000. On in and on: An investigation into the linguistic encoding of spatial scenes. Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University.

Feist, M. I., and D. Gentner. 1998. On plates, bowls, and dishes: Factors in the use of English IN and ON. Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 345-349.

Feist, M. I., and D. Gentner. 2001. An influence of spatial language on recognition memory for spatial scenes. Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 279-284.

Feist, M. I., and D. Gentner. 2003. Factors involved in the use of in and on. Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Accessed 1/2007 at http://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~mif8232/FeistGentner03.pdf.

Levinson, S. C., & Meira, S. 2003. 'Natural concepts' in the spatial topological domain - adpositional meanings in crosslinguistic perspective: An exercise in semantic typology. Language, 79(3), 485-516.

Március 17-én 101 éves korában elhunyt George F. Kennan, akit az amerikai hidegháborús külpolitika atyjaként ismert meg a világ. A szovjet-orosz területre specializálódott diplomatának meghatározó szerep jutott az Egyesült Államok új stratégiájának alakításában a hidegháború hajnalán. Később a külügyi szolgálatból visszavonulva a téma tudományos elemzésének szentelte életét, ám véleményére, tanulmányaira egészen haláláig figyeltek az amerikai külpolitika mindenkori alakítói.

Hydrogen accumulation at the top of containment or reactor building may occur due to an interaction of molten corium and water followed by a severe accident of a nuclear reactor (TMI, Chernobyl, Fukushima Daiichi). The hydrogen, released from the reactor, accumulates usually as a stratified semi-confined layer of hydrogen-air mixture. A series of large scale experiments on hydrogen combustion and explosion in a semi-confined layer of uniform and non-uniform hydrogen-air mixtures in presence of obstructions or without them was performed at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Different flame propagation regimes from slow subsonic to relative fast sonic flames and then to the detonations were experimentally investigated in different geometries and then simulated with COM3D code with respect to evaluate an amount of burnt hydrogen taken place during the Fukushima Daiichi Accident (FDA).
The experiments were performed in a horizontal semi-confined layer with dimensions of 9x3x0.6 m with/without obstacles opened from below. Hydrogen concentration in the mixtures with air was varied in the range of 0-34 vol.% without or with a gradient of 0-60 vol. %H2/m. Effects of the hydrogen concentration gradient, thickness of the layer, geometry of the obstructions, average and maximum hydrogen concentration on flame propagation regimes were investigated with respect to evaluate the maximum pressure loads of internal structures. Blast wave strength and dynamics of propagation after explosion of the layer of hydrogen-air mixture was numerically simulated to reproduce the hydrogen explosion process during the Fukushima Daiichi Accident.

This article will provide a more complete account of the impact of Radio Free Europe’s broadcasts on Soviet decision making during the crisis, drawing on documents released from Russian, Hungarian, and U.S. archives in recent years. It will be argued that early balloon and leaflet operations during reformist Imre Nagy’s first term as Hungarian prime minister (1953-1955) - namely “Operation Focus” - both antagonized Nagy and spawned a stern neutralism (later, hostility) toward him among US diplomats and RFE broadcasters during the crisis. This, in turn, caused Soviet leaders to doubt Nagy’s managerial skills, fear the power vacuum in Hungary, and conclude that a second military invasion was necessary. Specifically, one can conclude that RFE’s broadcasting was a key causal factor in the Soviet crackdown for at least three distinct, but interrelated, reasons: 1) the broadcasts contributed to Moscow’s lack of faith in Nagy’s ability to control the situation; 2) they aroused Soviet fears of Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact long before Nagy himself announced it; and 3) the broadcasts contributed to the disbandment of the Hungarian security police (ÁVH), thus convincing Soviet (and Hungarian) communist leaders that Soviet troops were needed to fill the security vacuum in Hungary.

A presenza histórica da identidade xitana en Galicia ocupa este artigo no que se trata de responder ás seguintes interrogantes: Como vivimos este tipo de diversidade cidadá nas nosas veciñanzas, nos nosos barrios, nas nosas escolas? Abrázase esta convivencia, ou máis ben se evita? Que papel xoga a escola neste contacto intercultural que comezou hai case 500 anos na península Ibérica? Como pode contribuír a fomentar a educación obrigatoria unha praxe cidadá intercultural que sexa gratificante e potenciadora da convivencia igualitaria e da xustiza social?

Abstract

The confrontation between Chinese and the Philippines’s navy in 1995, also known as the Mischief Reef Incident, reflected intentions and military capabilities of Chinese army, and, perhaps, triggered the threat perception of the Philippines’ decision makers. Embracing the notion of American- external balancing seems to be the rational choice for the Philippines, according to the ongoing disputes as well as China’s aggressiveness towards conflicts in the South China Sea. Furthermore, the China threat perception from the Philippines perspective also tallies with the US. Perception, considering the rise of China, politically and economically, will undermine the US’s interest. Rebalancing or pivoting strategy, therefore, became a new face of American foreign policy, aiming to increasing the U.S. power in Asia. Nevertheless, the American’s roles in the South China Sea dispute inevitably impact the political landscape of Southeast Asia, and, in many ways, make this region become a significant battlefield between the US and China.

Keywords: South China Sea; China Threat; China; the Philippines; Pivot to Asia

บทคัดย่อ

เหตุการณ์ปะทะกันระหว่างกองเรือจีนและฟิลิปปินส์บริเวณแนวปะการังมิสชีฟในปี 1995 สะท้อนเจตนาและขีดความสามารถของกองทัพจีน ตลอดจนการรับรู้ของผู้กำหนดนโยบายของฟิลิปปินส์ว่าจีนเป็นภัยคุกคามต่อความมั่นคงของฟิลิปปินส์อย่างแท้จริง การดึงรัฐมหาอำนาจภายนอกอย่างสหรัฐอเมริกาเพื่อค้ำประกันความมั่นคงปลอดภัยให้แก่ฟิลิปปินส์จึงถือเป็นทางเลือกอันสมเหตุสมผลของฟิลิปปินส์หากพิจารณาจากสภาพความขัดแย้งและท่าทีที่แข็งกร้าวของจีนต่อข้อพิพาทบริเวณทะเลจีนใต้ โดยการตระหนักว่าจีนเป็นภัยคุกคามของฟิลิปปินส์สอดรับกับการรับรู้ของสหรัฐฯที่พิจารณาการขยายอิทธิพลของจีนทั้งในมิติทางการเมืองและเศรษฐกิจว่าเป็นภัยคุกคามต่อผลประโยชน์ของสหรัฐฯและเป็นหนึ่งในเหตุผลที่ทำให้สหรัฐฯผลักดันยุทธศาสตร์ถ่วงดุลครั้งใหม่เพื่อเพิ่มบทบาทของตนเองในภูมิภาคเอเชีย อย่างไรก็ตาม การเพิ่มบทบาทของสหรัฐฯในกรณีพิพาทบริเวณทะเลจีนใต้ย่อมส่งผลให้เอเชียตะวันออกเฉียงใต้กลายเป็นสนามของเกมแห่งอำนาจที่สำคัญระหว่างจีนและสหรัฐฯ

คำสำคัญ: ทะเลจีนใต้; ภัยคุกคามจากจีน; จีน; ฟิลิปปินส์; สหรัฐฯกลับสู่เอเชีย